Angels and Demons

Mark Perry shares this excellent account of firefighters in the Boston area rushing to file for retirement in advance of a change in the law that would reduce their retirement benefits. Read the article – you will see that firefighters aren’t saints. They’re people, like the rest of us. They have incentives to do things that aren’t “right”. The list of people that do despicable things is long and “distinguished”: CEOs, politicians, doctors, scientists, firefighters, teachers, …, everybody.

We live in a world of incentives and those incentives do, always, exactly what they’re supposed to do: incentivize.

You gonna rail against “corporate greed”? Then you ought also to rail against “worker greed”.